Street Reading: World's Oldest Profession in Fiction

The members of the world’s oldest profession have been portrayed in many ways through fictional literature over the centuries, including the temptress, the fallen woman, the hooker with a heart of gold and the tragic victim.

The Greeks, the Romans, the Elizabethans and the Victorians were particularly fascinated by prostitutes although modern novelists keep returning to prostitution themes again and again. Our selection has tried to steer clear of erotica (although John Cleland’s Fanny Hill can be considered an early example of pornography in English prose) and the countless pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s that feature hookers. This list includes the likes of Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, Mario Llosa Vargas, William T. Vollmann and Paulo Coelho.

Working girls often appear as supporting characters – such as Lorena Wood in Lonesome Dove, Bianca in Othello, Sandy and Candy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind - but many writers have used a prostitute as their central character and attempted to provide an insight into sex and life on the Game.

Courtesans, streetwalkers, call-girls, escorts, hookers, madams, fallen women, scarlet women and ladies of the night – call them what you will, but prostitutes are continue to be a reoccurring theme in literature.